


Trade

by Tattered_Dreams



Series: In Any Other World [2]
Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Anxiety, BS medical procedures, Because fuck canon, Canon Divergence, Extreme Fear, Fix-It, Found Family, Gen, M/M, Major Spoilers, Newt Lives, Only one difference, Teamwork, Teresa is waaay complicated, The Death Cure, The Death Cure Spoilers, You read the torture from the pov of someone not enduring it though, but not completely, but serious vibes/undertones, depictions of psychological torture, high stress, just in case, okay i'll stop, oooooh boy, sorta - Freeform, tdc spoilers, technically its pre: Thomas/Newt, warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-19 16:14:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13708047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tattered_Dreams/pseuds/Tattered_Dreams
Summary: Major TDC Spoilers.-In which everything is the same but Newt survives-Canon up until the moment Teresa is Interrogated“But that was months ago,” she says, her mind at a complete standstill. Thomas just looks back at her. “Thomas, she should have turned by now.”He doesn’t even touch the statement.“You know how to get the serum, don’t you?”-A look into Teresa's seriously complicated mind-





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> A couple of things:
> 
> 1\. I split it into two because it got long. Still not sure how it happened.  
> 2\. It is from Teresa's perspective which was a tricky but rewarding thing to play with.  
> 3\. I don't want to spoil anything so know that the stuff mentioned in the tags isn't until part 2 and if you have concerns, please feel free to ask. In short - there are semi graphic descriptions of psychological torture happening to someone else. Its really more about the impact.  
> 4\. I apologise profusely for the angst.

T͟r̶̴ad̷̶̡͡e̡͝͏̨̛

Teresa watches them sedate Cheyenne through the glass.

She’s flailing; her limbs atrophied and fragile but lashing out with a viciousness to match the awful shrieking. It’s a noise that’s on the cusp of inhuman; something that can’t even properly express the agony and will eventually damage the chords of the voice box.

Teresa’s breath rushes in her ears from the short dash and the adrenaline burst of having Minho try to choke her. She can feel the way Ava turns to look at her with a kind of sympathy, her face solemn.

“It’s not your fault,” she assures her. “You did everything you could.”

And maybe Teresa does kind of know that, but it doesn’t help. All she can feel is a swirling, pulling regret, like being tugged in the wake of a riptide. This isn’t what she wanted. This isn’t what she signed on for – betrayed people for. It feels like the air closes in on her.

She can’t stay here.

She leaves, tears stinging behind her eyes, the pressure building in her head. There’s something she hasn’t thought of – there has to be. It doesn’t feel like she did everything she could.

She takes the elevator away from the trials level and back up to the development labs. It’s quiet there; only a few of the techs are about, most of them occupied with running tests on serum samples. At this time of day, most of the scientists with her clearance level are with the immunes. They run fearscape hallucinations for a few hours, in batches, before breaking for lunch.

Teresa only thinks of them as fearscapes. She doesn’t want to think of them as anything else. Vivid nightmares – nothing more. It’s false and you wake up. She tells herself the same thing every time she enters the WCKD building for the day. One day, maybe, she thinks she won’t need to tell herself anymore.

She sits at her usual desk in the lab, but finds her mind won’t fix on a task. It’s too busy, pulsing at her temples, trying to fit puzzle pieces together when they’re all blank and she can’t see what picture they should create.

Her morning moves slowly.

Ava comes to see her as the clock drags on. The blonde woman watches her quietly for a few moments, in the glass doorway of the lab, without speaking. Eventually, she straightens, hands pushed into the pockets of her white lab coat.

“It’s early,” she says, tone gentle but firm. “We’ve only just begun. We can’t expect things to work straight away, Teresa. Don’t lose hope.”

“I know,” Teresa replies, but it feels automatic, like speaking through water or from far away.

She knows the older woman is right; that expecting an actual cure this early in is wishful. It doesn’t make it easier to accept, but she always knew it was a distinct possibility this would be more complicated than just injecting serum. Still; she didn’t make the trade she did just to fail. She shakes herself and looks up, offering Ava a worn smile.

“I know,” she repeats. “I’m going to rerun some tests and look at some different ones; maybe see if I can isolate any external factors that might have contributed to a failed run.”

Ava’s face shifts into a smile that Teresa is inclined to think of as fond. She nods, turning back to the glass doorway.

“You’re very dedicated, Teresa. I knew that if we were to succeed, we would need people like you. Don’t forget to take a break.”

Teresa nods, holding onto her smile until she’s left blissfully alone.

.

She wasn’t lying just to get Ava off her back.

She’s right; it’s still early days, and the only way to make progress is by refining the only possible cure they do have. They have to do that by assessing it, each and every sample, every time it’s used, tracking the results and eliminating the unknowns until they can pinpoint a conclusive answer.

Teresa likes having facts; straightforward questions and solutions. That’s what this should be.

But she can’t work it out. The morning is slowly crawling past, each minute grating like its being dragged against its will. She runs all kinds of tests – some again and some new, as she’d said she would. All of them on the stock sample of Minho’s enzyme, kept back for records not for the trials.

There’s nothing wrong with it.

There’s no contamination, no foreign particles, no evidence it has reacted or changed form – not that it was ever allowed into contact with a catalyst in the first place. On a molecular level it appears to function as she first saw when checking the microscope yesterday evening. It’s a completely viable sample.

So why did it not work?

Or more accurately – because clearly it _had_ worked, for some time – why did it wear off?

Minho was their strongest candidate. He produced the most quantities of the serum of all of the twenty nine subjects, and his had the strongest antibodies. Clearly that wasn’t enough, somehow. But if he couldn’t provide what they needed, then who-

Thomas.

Teresa’s fingers twitch on the test result sheet she’s holding and she has to clamp down on a breath, force herself to continue on.

She does still think of Thomas. It’s by mistake, an automatic response to missing someone you’ve known for…for as long as you have memories. It’s a difficult thing to break, but she’s trying, mostly because it’s difficult to think of him, too.

Thomas is a double edged sword in her memories now.

She grew up with him, watched him interact with the other boys, and then eventually watched him parted from them, one at a time. She still isn’t sure how she missed all the signs he was changing sides.

Thomas is not a subtle person. If he has an opinion or an impulse, he acts on it without thought for tact or caution. That was where she and the others had helped to balance him.

But somehow he had kept his treason from her.

A year ago, in the mountains, her memories had been flooding back, even if Thomas’ weren’t. She hadn’t known he had leaked information to the resistance until that evening. She did remember the way he’d come to her, desperately, in the recesses of the old WCKD compound that surrounded the Maze. She remembered the way he’d told her, apologetic but also unrepentant that he had to do it.

He was taken away that day.

She was told afterwards that putting him in the Maze had become vital, but not why. She only watched him for a few days – the way he seemed to so quickly reclaim the friends he loved and lost, even though they had no memories to pull from. And then she was asked to join him.

“It will be necessary, Teresa,” she remembered Ava saying, the night Thomas ran into the Maze for Minho. The entire Glade stayed by the doors all night. “Thomas doesn’t remember anything now, and he was always close to the others. He’ll need you when this part is over.”

She hadn’t thought about it then. She had just nodded, agreed, and taken herself to the lab for the Swipe. But now she knows better.

Ava knew Thomas turned against them; traded her, WCKD and their mission for the lives of his friends, ones who couldn’t remember him. His memories were taken as a reset, and maybe Ava hoped that in the Maze, coming to care for his friends again, she would be able to use him once more; use him through them, maybe. And if she couldn’t – Teresa would sway him for her.

Only it hadn’t worked out that way, had it?

Even with no memories of growing up with those boys, he’d forged something new, but just as unbreakable with them in a matter of days. Teresa’s slowly returning memories or the influence she may have had over him weren’t enough to matter; not against Newt, Minho and Frypan; the only ones left.  He’d sided with them again, just as fully aware of what the cost was.

Teresa shakes herself again.

Her mind is spiralling too easily today.

Those memories are not why his name crossed her mind.

Somehow WCKD knew. They always said he was special, but did they even know why? Was it his uncanny ability to think in the space of a heartbeat, to not know how to quit, to inexplicably survive? Or was it something else? Something they knew about his blood – his immunity?

Teresa writes it off as entirely unlikely. The reason this is so difficult, so trying is because they don’t understand enough about immunity. So that can’t be it.

Thomas can’t matter now, though.

He’s gone. She has no idea where he is. She’s sure he isn’t dead, but that’s about it, and based more in an ingrained belief of his impossible ability to thrive more than any real feeling or report of news.

Teresa doesn’t think for an instant he’s given up. He’d never leave Minho behind – in the same way he’d once risked the success of an escape just to go back for her. She always just figured it was a matter of time. If it’s taking this long for any sighting of him, it’s either because he can’t get to them, or because he’s waiting.

Mildly Teresa wonders what his life does look like right now.

Is Brenda even still alive? Without Mary there was surely no available way to get her further treatment. Teresa hates that – hates remembering it. She did this to save people and she never intended Brenda to be a casualty. But what about Jorge? Would he have left after she inevitably turned? Or would he have stayed because he had nothing else?

And what of the boys? Frypan tried to be optimistic, but he wasn’t a big fighter. Newt…Newt had suffered for a long time, but Thomas gave him hope and Minho was his oldest friend. Even if it was sure to fail Newt would never leave Thomas to go after Minho alone. It came from a place of loyalty and faith, perhaps more than his disregard for his own life.

No. Wherever Thomas was, he wasn’t totally alone. Not unless something had happened to force it.

Teresa is reminded of the point of all her muddled thoughts as she finally sits back down at her desk, amazed to realise its still the morning when she lays eyes on the clock.

The important thing here is that Thomas isn’t an option. Not now. Not when he could be anywhere.

Which means she has to let that go and keep looking inside the WCKD building for answers.

They have twenty nine kids of varying ages who are already feeling the toll of the procedures. Minho is their strongest option but his serum failed its first clinical trial after just…she checks the clock again…eleven hours. Cheyenne was injected the evening before and Teresa had barely clocked in and escaped Minho’s rage in that interview room before she was told it had worn off.

And that’s when her brain completely stalls. Her fingers go still on the focus wheels of the microscope before her.

_And they have her._

She is immune, too.

She was promised safety in return for bringing back the others, and she’s more use to them now with her knowledge and skills in the labs. But. She is immune.

Isn’t this what scratched at her mind earlier?

_You did everything you could_

But what if she hadn’t?

And then, for the rest of the day, that’s all she can think about.

She believes in this; believes in the work. She’s a hypocrite for allowing these tests to happen to others when she’s sitting here, everyday, her body capable of producing that same enzyme. And she’s been able to not think of it, because she’s valuable here, but now she can’t stop.

Her focus, already on edge, shifts completely and running another test becomes a vague concept.

Right across the other side of the lab are the lock cabinets where they keep the hallucinogens, the sedatives and the paralytics. Beside them are the organised cases of tubing, cannulas, trackers and distillation vials. Right there is everything needed to put a subject into a fearscape and extract the enzyme.

And not a single person in the lab would question her if she took any out.

To Teresa’s mind, it’s a bit foolhardy.

She betrayed people once, why wouldn’t she do it again? She could have been a mole, placed here by design, feeding information back to Thomas. But she knows that’s not how it went down, and WCKD – Ava – seems to as well. Instead, they have complete, total faith in her that isn’t misplaced, simply because she _did_ betray people she cared for. Maybe they assume she wouldn’t have done that lightly.

And they’re right.

She skips lunch.

Her stomach is roiling and the thought of eating makes her queasy. Instead she runs some more checks on Minho’s serum – some repeated, because repetition establishes a mean, after all – but nothing flags up. The whole thing feels like following motions anyway. Her mind stays locked onto the cabinet.

She goes to check on Cheyenne. The girl is still heavily sedated but the poisoned black veins webbed across her face and winding up her arms like the clinging roots of a tree are angry. Whatever she regained for those few hours, it’s long gone again.

From there, Teresa heads to the Extraction levels. She watches some of the fearscapes with a couple of young teen immunes. If they gave themselves names in their mazes, Teresa doesn’t know them. In general, she tries not to watch these, to stay away, for reasons she won’t look too closely at, but today she’s here.

The recognition from the morning – you’re immune, too – hasn’t faded. It’s festered, taken root, like a parasite in her thoughts and it won’t leave.

She wants to see. Wants to know.

The end of the day is finally drawing in. Time is moving like the tide; slowly, so slowly until suddenly everything is under and you didn’t notice it getting closer. She’s always working late, recently, now that they have the continued funding for the trials, but even her extra hours are almost up.

Suddenly, she’s running out of time.

Teresa escapes the techs and the labs and finds a quiet corner of the office levels to contemplate. She needs to think this through. She can’t be rash about it.

She knows how to rig a person to the extraction equipment. She knows what the dose of hallucinogen is, the right amount of paralytic for one session in a fearscape. Both of them fade from the bloodstream within an hour. She doesn’t need an intravenous agent to counteract the effects. She could do it alone.

She’s seen the immunes screaming. She’s witnessed their terror, their horror and agony, but they weren’t prepared. She is. She knows its fake; just a drug. She’ll wake up. She holds onto that.

She only has to do it once. Just enough serum to run a few tests.

The chances are that her enzyme has the same lifespan as anyone else’s, and if it does work better…well… she can cross that bridge if she comes to it.

She just has to be brave enough.

And then she decides – she realises – she has to be. It’s about the world; something far bigger than her. It’s about being prepared to endure what she has been putting others through.

.

No one looks twice when Teresa strides to the cabinets in the lab and takes everything she needs.

She picks up a result sheet from her desk – the one laying on the top – and makes her way out, collecting one of the portable vitals monitors on the way. In the elevator to the trials floor, she hides all the equipment in the pockets of her lab coat, and any available pocket in the clothes she has on underneath. Most of them are small; the syringes and vials. The tubing is the most difficult to conceal, but she does.

She looks in on Cheyenne one last time and then nods to Ava through the glass wall before she heads down to the staffing levels. She transfers everything into the deep recesses of her bag, sheds her lab coat and pulls her jacket and scarf from the locker.

She leaves the building without even a sideways glance. The guards on duty nod at her as she passes and then she’s in the open.

It’s all felt a little too easy.

Now is where the uncertainty begins to stir; a swirling, uneasy kind of current low in her chest that feels like its sending electric pulses down her limbs. She walks in a daze. She’s surrounded by crowds of people – most wearing masks in a futile hope to guard themselves from the Flare – but she feels distant from them. It’s like walking on a seabed – what she imagines, anyway; she’s never even seen the sea – resistance and yet a kind of weightlessness. The lights of the city in the newly fallen darkness glow blue overhead, the spires of buildings seeking upwards into the blackness. The Last City has never really felt claustrophobic to her until now.

The world swims in her eyes.

She can barely spare any heart for the man who’s pulled to the pavement just metres from her when she stops at a crosswalk. This is happening. It’s happening to everyone. She can’t let herself feel for him, but it does set her resolve.

And then.

Thomas.

He’s standing there. Just…standing there, the other side of the road.

He looks healthy. There’s a guarded kind of ease to his expression; something that pulls at her heart but warns her at the same time. He’s just…there. Somehow, inexplicably, in this City.

And Teresa knows better than to believe this was any kind of mistake.

But then a bus passes and he’s gone. He’s just- wait, not gone – walking away.

The dark hooded sweater, pulled up makes him anonymous in the milling people, and he slips between them easily. He’s sliding away from her already.

Teresa starts moving, desperation surging through her blood like ice water.

It’s been a year.

Holding to the belief he was alive is nothing compared to this – to knowing, seeing for herself. And now, even if they’ve still placed themselves on opposite sides of a battlefield, she just wants to know. She wants to see him.

She fights through the crowd, gets tugged into its slipstream, and when she pulls herself free, they’re in the lobby of the tram station. The gleaming white floors and high ceiling feel empty and vast and for an instant she thinks her heart stops because was that it? Was this a warning? The only warning he was prepared to give her?

But then she sees him, striding away, back outside. She starts running.

And it doesn’t matter that she calls for him; his steps don’t even falter. He only glances back when he rounds the wall.

The rain slick street is completely deserted when she bursts onto it. It’s a sheltered taxi bay, blue strobes lining the pillars, giving it a tunnelled effect. The alcoves between them for cars to pull into are unlit, cast into deep shadow that consumes everything beyond.

She turns, looking for him, and then suddenly, she can just feel him there.

He steps into the cold light, lowering the hood. He looks different. Older. It’s to be expected, but its not just in physical appearance – he doesn’t seem to be carrying around the boy from the glade anymore. This is something else; something more.

They were running before. They were just going to run and keep running until they could get somewhere safe. And then she called WCKD to them. That’s when it changed.

They declared war when Minho was taken.

This Thomas isn’t running, and Teresa thinks absently that even the one she knew wasn’t made for that; not in that way. This one is coming for them. He traded self preservation for vengeance, and she may as well have placed it in his hands herself.

“Thomas,” she says. It’s both just because she wants to – she’s been careful not to really talk about him since the mountain – but she also wants to gauge him; it’s the barest breath of a question. This was never meant to be the two of them, and even if he chose his side, and she knows he won’t be moved from it, she still doesn’t want him to be hurt.

“Hey, Teresa.”

His voice is soft, a rough undertone, and there’s a devastating kind of sadness to it.

They both know they’re talking to each other across a chasm that can’t be bridged.

It breaks her heart. This will be all they get.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she says. “If Janson finds out you’re here-“

“I’m not staying,” he interrupts, his voice sliding into even more of a murmur, the words only audible in the way the taxi bay’s acoustics allows them to cross space. He steps cautiously closer. “It’s just, uh…I had to see you.”

He stops. There’s a blank but also unbearable kind of sadness in his eyes. “I had to ask you something.”

Teresa doesn’t know what to say. The silence presses in on her and Thomas finally speaks again.

“Do you regret it?”

Her heart constricts. The memory of that day is vivid, and she knew Thomas would never have forgotten it.

“What you did to us?”

It’s suddenly hard to look at him. She blinks, tears stinging her eyes again – she’s felt like this too much for one day – and has to push everything down. Deal with it later. Right now there’s this.

She forces herself to lift her gaze again. Everything is still. It hangs on this, and if this is all she gets…she wants it to be honest.

“Sometimes,” she confesses. She regrets what happened between them, regrets that she was the reason Thomas was ready to press down on a detonator on that mountain. She has regrets. But they’re not enough. “But I did what I thought was right.”

She watches him. Watches the way he seems to process her words.

“I’d do it again,” she finishes, barely a murmur around the tightness in her throat. She knows she can’t change his mind, and he needs to know he can’t change hers.

She watches the way his expression shutters, folds, dies. It’s subtle, quiet. It feels like being stabbed, the fallout brutal.

“Good,” he whispers.

She isn’t sure what she expected, but that wasn’t it.

She frowns; Thomas’ eyes flit over her shoulder, but she has no time to ask.

There’s fast movement behind her, the barest rustle of footsteps. Her body is lurched off balance, she feels the rough swipe of fabric against her head and then everything is dark.

She panics, tries to turn, to reach out and – there, someone, Thomas, has her hands. But he isn’t helping her. He holds her wrists, entrapping them.

“Teresa,” he says to her, his voice firm and low. “If you fight us, we will tie you up. If you still fight, we will knock you out. Nod if you understand me.”

Teresa swallows. She nods.

“Let’s go,” Thomas says, and he takes her elbow instead, leading her away. She’s already lost her bearings – the bag over her head is thick, rough fabric and it doesn’t let any light in. It smells sweet and musty, overpowering enough that she can’t smell anything else.

She’s reminded that Thomas may be impulsive, even reckless, but he isn’t an idiot.

She doesn’t even ask where he’s taking her. She knows she won’t get an answer.

.

When the bag is tugged off of her head, the first thing she registers is that Newt is the one to do it.

He looks worn, tired, his expression guarded as he walks away from her with barely a backwards glance.

That’s when Teresa takes in everything else.

They’re in a church. It’s clearly not been in use for some time. There are no pews, no alter, the stained glass windows are dark and grotty and cobwebs are spun thick as gossamer from the once ornate carvings in the walls. There’s a couple of bright spotlights and a dozen or so candles that offer enough light to make out shapes and reveal the group in front of her, but mostly everything is black and blue; shadow and moonlight.

Thomas is seated away from her, a kind of resoluteness in his expression and posture she’s not seen directed at her before. It hurts, but she knows she caused it. His eyes are on Newt as the taller boy walks over to them. Frypan stands just behind, his arms folded and something rigid in his shoulders. Jorge is still there, right behind Gally –

Wait.

That really is him; perched on the table, looking taller than ever, his expression fierce. He’s…alive? She watched the spear sink into his chest, watched the way he crumpled to the floor; a grainy memory of blood, shattered glass and a smoking gun. But he’s here right now.

“Gally?” she asks aloud, stunned.

He is entirely unmoved by her shock.

“Here’s how this is gonna go,” he begins, and none of the others make a move to interrupt. “We’re going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to tell us exactly what we need to know.”

Teresa wildly looks around. This has to be some kind of…well not a joke but…she doesn’t know how it’s possible.

“We’ll start off simple,” Gally says. He stands, grabs an unoccupied chair by the back piece and starts towards her. “Where’s Minho?”

Of course.

So this is it. The thing that Janson and Ava and even she have been spending every day in wait for – when they’ll come for him. Her eyes jump to Thomas – he’s the only one she can appeal to for how dangerous this will be.

“You guys don’t seriously think that-“

Gally’s chair slams down right in front of her, and he crashes into it, straddling the sides with his arms folding over the back. He plants himself almost directly in her eye line of Thomas.

“Don’t look at him,” he says. “Why’re you looking at him? Look at me. He’s not going to help you.”

Teresa’s eyes dart to him again anyway, and she feels her heart twist painfully because…he’s right. Thomas’ eyes lift up, and while he doesn’t look happy about any of this, she can also see that same resolution in him. He’s allowing this. Maybe he even arranged it himself.

And although it was Newt who took off the bag, Teresa suddenly can’t escape the surety that Gally was the one to put it there.

She’s never seen the two of them even mildly in synch before. It’s strange. How much has she missed?

“Now, we know you have Minho in the building,” Gally presses. “Where?”

His voice doesn’t rise, but it doesn’t have to. Maybe he went a little crazy back in the Maze, but he always did have a leader’s influence.

 And right now, Teresa is hedging her bets. They can’t get in anyway; Minho can’t get out. If she answers, she can find out more.

“He’s with the others in holding,” she says. “Sublevel three.”

“How many others?” Newt asks.

Teresa’s eyes flit to him, now sitting in a chair next to Thomas’, a distance away from her.

“Twenty eight.”

Gally looks right around. Heads turn after his and Teresa follows them to a table even further back, lit up with disfigured candles that have been burning for too long.

Brenda.

She’s still alive.

“I can make that work,” she says, turning a playing card in her fingers, eyes on the table.

“No,” Teresa says, on autopilot. Heads turn back to face her and she quickly tries to swallow back her shock. Alive. Still. How? “No you guys don’t understand. The whole level’s restricted. Y-you can’t get in without a thumbprint ID.”

“That’s why you’re gonna come with us,” Thomas says, leaning forward. His tone allows for no disagreement.

“Well I don’t know,” Gally interrupts. His expression is hard, challenging, the edge of false consideration quickly melting away. “We don’t necessarily need her. Right?” He stands, swings the chair away and turns back for the table. “Not all of her.”

Teresa hears the metallic chink and scrape of something sharp.

He turns around and the muted light that does filter down to them slides dully off of what she thinks is a piece of shrapnel, or maybe a disfigured scalpel.

“We just need her finger.”

Her heart lurches.

_He wouldn’t, would he?_

A year ago he’d been prepared to sacrifice her to grievers for safety – maybe to him, cutting off her thumb, was really nothing in comparison. And Thomas – was he really going to let him do it?

“Gally, back off.”

Thomas’ words cut through her and her eyes close with abject relief.

“What, you squeamish?” Gally asks him. He jabs the blade into the dead air between them. “I guarantee you she’s done a lot worse to Minho.”

She’s never cut Minho’s finger off, Teresa thinks absently, but then perhaps their concept of torture is relative rather than linear.

“That’s not the plan.” Thomas stands, moving forward. He takes the scalpel, and Gally lets him. “Back off.”

“It won’t make a difference,” Teresa insists, her fears subsiding for a possibly reckless confidence for just a moment. Thomas is still going to stand between her and a knife. “Do whatever you want to me, you still won’t get through the front door – the sensors will pick you up as soon as-“

“We know,” Thomas overrides her.

The scalpel blade turns between his fingers. Gally rocks back against the edge of the table, a little put out, hands in the tunnel pocket of his sweater.

“We’re tagged,” Thomas continues. “Property of WCKD.”

He crosses to her, sinks down to crouch at the side of the chair she’s been pressed into. Teresa meets his eyes; she can feel a tight heaviness in the air and she worries for him, even though she knows he’s beyond her reach now. Still she can’t help the way her brain buzzes over Brenda.

She suddenly feels off kilter, like she’s missed out on far more than just a year.

“You’re going to help us with that, too,” Thomas says.

He raises the scalpel between them.

.

Teresa can’t stop glancing at Brenda.

She knows the boys are watching her carefully, and she’s trying to hide her amazement, but she can’t stop her eyes flitting to her. The other girl looks just so…healthy. Teresa’s been running tests for months. Ava kept her away from most of the Crank subjects they had in containment, but she’d seen some at a distance here and there. Maybe the night before was their earliest clinical trial, but even that didn’t restore this kind of vitality to Cheyenne in the hours she was herself again. Teresa doesn’t know what to do with that.

Brenda and Jorge hover over by a cluster of candles further down the abandoned church, their voices low and inaudible, but they’re clearly speaking closely.

How have they done it?

Mary was able to give her an injection a year ago – Teresa still has no idea how. She remembers asking Ava about it on the ride back, explaining how they were travelling with an infected girl and Mary had given her serum. Ava’s face had gone very still, very difficult to read, and then she had patted Teresa on the arm.

“There’s no way of knowing,” she had said. “And the risk is too great; too many more factors to go wrong. This is the best way, Teresa. The only way that can really help.”

And Teresa believed it.

She still does.

But that doesn’t answer the how.

Mary died. Janson shot her. Has Thomas been able to find more of the serum? Is she being dosed on it? Then why does she look fine? More than fine? Are there people out there who are extracting serum somehow, using unclean tools and risky methods?

It’s a thought that horrifies her. They’re doing it this way because, despite the downsides, despite the fears that are necessary, it’s safe. As safe as they can make it.

Teresa is shaken from her thoughts when something slams down on the table in front of her. She barely registers it’s a small first aid kit before her eyes are jumping up, skittering as they meet Newt’s.

He looks even more tired, but there’s a fierceness in his expression that Teresa has only seen pieces of before. Or maybe it’s just that she’s never been on this side of it.

“That’s everything you need,” he says.

Teresa nods.

She tries to busy her mildly shaking hands with laying out the items. She just has this one scalpel blade, and it will need to be disinfected between cutting each of the boys. It should keep her occupied, but her eyes flicker back up to Newt as he moves away.

He strides towards Thomas, fingers curling around his best friend’s bicep when he steps in close enough. Thomas’ attention snaps to him and then the pair of them move fluidly away, all without a word.

Teresa frowns. Something there is different. Those two always got each other, were always close, but something that she can’t quite identify is just…different. Maybe it’s just the fact that Minho isn’t there, so how close they are seems amplified.

Gally glares over at her and she quickly returns her eyes to the supplies.

But Newt didn’t lead Thomas far enough. She can just, if she tries really hard, and if Gally stops rustling his canvas pant legs, hear what he says in a soft undertone.

“What did she know about Brenda?”

Teresa has to work hard not to freeze and give away her eavesdropping. She focuses on laying out gauze.

“What do you mean?” Thomas sounds confused.

“I don’t know,” Newt admits. “Just that…she seems kind of amazed Brenda’s even here.”

There’s a stagnant pause and then Thomas barely breathes, surprise colouring his tone, “Mary said – you think – then…how-?”

Teresa would like to know that, too.

A second passes. What sounds like a sharp inhalation of breath.

“Tommy!”

She hears Newt say it, louder, in some kind of warning or restraint but by the time her eyes flash up, automatic, Thomas is already dropping into the empty seat in front of her.

There’s a level frankness to him and right away she knows she can’t play with the truth right now. He’ll know.

“You weren’t expecting Brenda,” he says. He’s not asking.

Newt has moved behind him, a tension through his face and shoulders that Teresa doesn’t recognise. He looks almost…concerned, resistant.

“After Mary…I didn’t know anyone could make the serum that she needs outside of WCKD,” Teresa says honestly. She leans forward, because she needs them to know she’s really being truthful about this. “We’re not even able to make one inside that really lasts, that really works. How have you been getting her serum?”

“What are you talking about?” Thomas asks. His brow furrows, but he’s still painfully hard to read.

“I didn’t think she’d still be alive,” Teresa says. She had never wanted her to die, though. “When was her last treatment?”

She has so many questions – did they use Thomas again, or someone else? Where did they go for treatment, how did they do it? But right now, the ‘when’ is the one that comes out.

Thomas glances around. He and Newt share a loaded look that Teresa just can’t decipher – but she knows she lost her right to question them a long time ago. Gally moves in, hovering the other side of the table like he’s waiting to be asked who he needs to punch. Frypan rests a hand on his shoulder but his expression is as fixed as the rest.

_What is going on?_

Thomas turns back to her.

“Tommy,” Newt says, in that same tone – half warning, half pleading.

Thomas ignores him.

“You were there,” he tells her, expression now settled in some odd way. Still resolute, but there’s something else now. “The Right Arm.”

Teresa feels like she’s gone into some kind of mental glitch.

That…doesn’t work. It just…

“But that was months ago,” she says, her mind at a complete standstill. Thomas just looks back at her. “Thomas, she should have turned by now.”

He doesn’t even touch the statement.

“You know how to get the serum, don’t you?”

Teresa can feel her eyes go wide. She isn’t sure why he’d ask – Brenda’s fine - but maybe he’s planning ahead. She has just told him that they can’t make the enzyme last. But then…if that’s true…Thomas’ one is lasting. Sure, it’ll have to wear out eventually, but it’s actually holding; enough to give Brenda a full life in the interim.

A kind of swirling nausea twins with sharp realisation in her stomach. If that’s the case, then Thomas has to be tested – they have to know – but…she never wanted it to be him going through this. Maybe the fact that she does know how is something she can use.

But, despite herself, her eyes shoot across to the larger table where Gally tossed her bag down.

And it’s too late.

“What?” Gally scoffs in disbelief, already moving towards it. “You have some in your bag?”

“No!” Teresa jumps up, and Thomas does the same opposite, blocking her. There’s something almost wild in his eyes. She freezes. He won’t let her past. Something is going on here that is way bigger than Brenda or the two of them. She just doesn’t know _what_.

Gally tips up her bag.

The contents spill across the table; a data tablet, a bottle of water, a tube of lip balm, a flashlight, a set of keys and the ringing cascade of loose change. The stapled together sheets of the test result she picked up flop down and with it the concealed equipment to run a fearscape. The cannula, syringes, tubing, the portable vitals monitor and the tiny vials of the drugs all scatter.

Everyone is silent. Teresa can feel her blood rushing in her ears, the racing pulse of her heart straining inside her ribs like a percussion beat.

“Thomas?” Gally finally asks, voice low.

With a last, deliberate stare at her, Thomas moves away, slips around Newt and goes to stand over the table. He runs his fingers over the tubes, brushes aside the cannula in its sterile packet and then picks up the hallucinogen drug.

He looks back at her. “What is this stuff?”

She tells him. Because this is important; finding a cure, no matter how much she doesn’t want to see Thomas endure any more. If he is their answer … The world has to come first. They have to test him. And Thomas won’t help unless he knows everything.

“It’s how we’re extracting the serum,” she says. She doesn’t move to him. Newt is rigid where Thomas passed him and she’s sure, without knowing exactly how, that he won’t let her do the same. “We use a paralytic and the hallucinogen to put them into a state where they can’t hurt themselves, while their brains process fears specific to them. It’s what triggers the secretion of the enzyme. The rest is there to properly drain it.”

“Mary saved Brenda with my blood,” Thomas says, turning the vial between his fingers, anger steadily growing in his voice. “You’re putting all those kids – Minho – through, what – hours of complete terror when you could be doing this another way?!”

Teresa can feel her heart cracking because she _doesn’t know._

“We don’t know another way, Thomas. Not one that’s safe. This way is tested; we know the subjects-“ Gally makes a derisive kind of growl and Teresa quickly amends- “We know they’re okay, when they come out of it. For all we know the way Mary did it was luck. It could have been contaminated; it could have killed Brenda instead.”

“Oh yeah, they’re fine,” Frypan says, deeply sarcastic, and Teresa startles because he’s not spoken to her once and also because she didn’t expect it from him. He looks as angry as she’s ever seen him. “Fine except for the fact that you’re psychologically torturing them all every day. You may not be cutting them up but you really think this doesn’t do anything to them?”

She takes a step, and both Newt and Fry block her. Sinking back to her spot beside the chair she instead gestures to the table. “Look. At the papers. Look at them.”

Gally picks them up. “What is this?”

“They’re lab results.” And she knows which ones were on the top of her desk – which ones she collected before leaving. “They’re Minho’s.”

Thomas sets down the vial on the table and takes the sheets. Newt and Frypan both look over, waiting. It’s like observing a wolf pack, almost. The way they’re all in tune, all working together, all feral to any hint of a threat.

“Thomas?” Frypan asks.

“Just test results,” Thomas says, a wave of disappointment in his voice. “I can’t – I feel like I know some of this but it just doesn’t…”

“I saw him today,” Teresa interrupts.

All of their heads snap back to her.

“What?” Gally barks.

She swallows. She’s started this, on an impulse, but now…she has to go through with it. She could lie. No. She casts that thought aside. What they’re talking about doing is madness- even suicidal. If she can give them this, maybe it can sway them. Maybe.

“I saw him,” she repeats. “I-…It was his serum that started clinical trials last night. I wanted to see him – to tell him that he could really save someone. That was before I knew it was already wearing off. He…he didn’t want to talk to me.”

“Are you surprised?” Gally scoffs at her, voice hard.

She shakes her head. “But he did. Before I left. He…” and this is where she remembers.

Of course she knew it at the time; that the spike in her hair was missing after that, but she hadn’t told anyone. She blamed herself; she got too close, let it get personal, given him the opening. She hadn’t wanted to admit that. But when she also realised it wasn’t in the room after going back later, she knew where it must be. A guard would have reported it.

Minho had it.

Security was too tight. He was kept sedated too much – there was so little he could do with just one hair stick. So she kept quiet. She wanted him to have that; some form of hope, however false.

It’s only now that it occurs to her that maybe he didn’t steal it intending to break out. A guard could stop him escaping, but would they be quick enough to stop him using it on himself?

It makes her chest constrict and horror flood through her bloodstream. This isn’t what she wanted. How did things become this way?

She shakes herself. Impatience buzzes in the room with her silence so she resumes as hastily as she can.

“He spoke to me. Called me a traitor. He attacked me. The guards had to pull him off.”

“That’s Minho,” Frypan says. He sounds almost proud.

Teresa shoots him a look, eyes darting around to catch them all – where has Brenda even gone? – “No, don’t you get it?” she asks. “He’s still in there. He’s still Minho. We’re doing this to save the world. It’s so much bigger than us. But we’re not trying to destroy anyone to do it.”

“No, I don’t think _you_ get it,” Thomas says suddenly, fury flickering through his face. He turns back to the table, drops the lab sheets and then picks up the vial again.

Newt goes, if it’s even possible, even tenser. “Tommy.”

This time, Thomas looks at him. There’s something apologetic in his face, but also something resolute. If Teresa can see that, she knows Newt does.

“There’s no time,” Newt says.

“Yeah there is,” Thomas murmurs. He looks over at her. “This isn’t much.”

It’s not really a question. He would have known about this before his Swipe but because all that is still gone, he probably doesn’t know how he knows.

Is he…going to do this? Is he going to let her test him; going to put the world first?

Teresa fills in the blank, hope swelling in her chest.

“That dose will metabolise in less than an hour. Serum secretion ranges, but Minho has been one of the best. With the same amount, there was enough to treat a girl in the Trials.”

“Yeah, enough,” Newt snaps, and there’s something uncharacteristically sharp and malevolent in his voice. His eyes are burning, hands shaking at his sides as he curls his fingers in. His attention swings from her to Thomas. “But it didn’t last, did it? Don’t be a bloody idiot, Thomas. We don’t have time for this.”

“Yeah, we do.” Thomas says again. He strides towards them. Gally looks a mix of uncertain, wary and completely in agreement. Thomas stops right in front of Newt, and for a second he doesn’t say anything. He just stands there and looks the taller boy in the eyes, fearless and steadfast in the face of his anger.

There’s a shift.

A tiny one. That fever in Newt’s expression flickers. He blinks, glancing around to the others, the crackling malice twisting with horror and anxiety but he doesn’t back down. Apology softens the corners of his mouth, but his eyes hold fast as they fix back on Thomas.

Alarm flares up Teresa’s spine like being electrocuted.

Newt has always had more sway over Thomas than the rest of them. If he can get through to him, Thomas might change his mind about this – and they need him.

“Maybe Minho’s stopped working. And soon we’ll tease him for that,” Thomas says. He’s still talking directly to Newt, his voice is steady. “But mine didn’t.”

Thomas has turned to her, and he raises the vial in his fingers between them.

“Thomas-“ she tries, feeling like she’s talking around a rock in her throat. She wants to thank him, but isn’t too sure how, or if he’ll want to hear it. Despite herself she still dreads the moment she’ll actually have to drug him.

“Don’t,” Thomas tells her, and there’s a coldness to it that makes her freeze. He slips past Newt again, this time a hand brushing across his arm somewhere between reassuring and restraining, and then he stands in front of her.

“I’m not doing this for you,” he tells her solidly.

It feels like her heart stops.

“You’re going to take out the tracker,” Thomas tells her. “And then you’re going to put me under while you take out theirs.”

Newt looks furious.

“Are you _insane_ , you dumb Shank?” he demands, suddenly firing off again. “You’re going to let her shoot you up with this stuff? You don’t even know if she’s telling the truth!”

“He’s not wrong, Thomas,” Frypan points out, though he’s glancing uneasily at Newt. “Come on, Man. Weren’t we just saying its not just as simple as a nightmare? This’ll do stuff to you.”

Thomas won’t be swayed. Teresa can see that. She still doesn’t quite know why.

If he’s not doing it for her, or because it’s right, or even for the world, then…

“Minho’s being forced through this,” Thomas says darkly. “I’m not.”

Gally swallows hard behind Thomas, his arms folding tight across his chest. Frypan looks between her and them, complete uncertainty glazing his eyes.

“And she’s telling the truth,” Thomas continues. Now he’s looking at her. Reckless, impulsive, rash maybe; but he wasn’t stupid. He knows why she has those things with her. “She planned on using it on herself.”

That seems to shake Newt loose again. The kindling of rage in him sputters out as he wheels to look at her. Gally and Frypan both turn astonished looks her way, too. Teresa keeps her eyes on Thomas.

“A young girl today regressed back to the Gone,” she says, barely a whisper, horrified at the memory but needing to tell them. She needs Thomas to know the difference he could make. “I just wanted to know that I’d done everything I could.”

“But you don’t know if your…serum,” Thomas uses the word haltingly, like he wishes he wasn’t, “is any good. Right now you know mine can last a year.”

She nods, stiffly. Tension clutches the room with ragged fingers.

“You’re going to put me under,” he says, again.

Gally throws up his hands behind him and turns, agitated before rubbing his forehead and somehow resuming his fixed stance. Frypan is shaking his head. Newt looks hollowed out, exhausted and terrified.

“Why are you doing this?” Teresa manages to whisper. She wants to know. He’s never done anything without the proper motivation, and it pains her, how distant they’ve grown, how long it’s been, that she can’t read him anymore.

“This is a trade,” Thomas tells her clearly. “You want some of my brain to test? You can have it – and I don’t care what you do with it. But first, you’re going to get a dose and you’re going to give it to Newt.”

.

It feels like puzzle pieces, clicking together all at once, and the picture on them cracking into focus.

This is it – the one piece she couldn’t quite see, couldn’t quite work out. Newt is sick. He has the Flare.

Ava, always wary of her experience with her infected mother, had ensured Teresa didn’t have too much exposure to the Cranks themselves. Her job was predominantly in the labs, with the serum.

Perhaps that was why Cheyenne touched her so hard; she was one of the few Teresa saw on a regular basis and only because she was still in an early enough stage to be able to hold most of her sanity. The moments she wasn’t fully there, Teresa had never been present for, only informed of, until that morning.

With those thoughts filtering through the complete shock muffling her brain, she can forgive herself a little for not realising sooner. She’s never really seen Newt this…volatile. There’s never been this kind of rage burning under his skin, he’s never been so easy to raise his voice. But she hasn’t seen them for a year, and she’s also never known a Newt who had Minho taken from him, or one about to watch their best friend enter a fearscape. She figured that explained it.

But it doesn’t.

He’s infected. There’s no physical sign she can see – not yet – but if the mood swings have already begun, surely it won’t be long, and if they’re really staging some kind of rescue tonight…it could bring it on all the faster.

Teresa turns her eyes to Thomas.

He’s waiting for her. Waiting to see what she’ll say, but Teresa already knows she has no other option. She needs Thomas’ enzyme. That’s what she did all this for. She traded her friends for the world and it can’t be for nothing. But Thomas won’t help her if she won’t save Newt.

He meant it.

He isn’t doing it for her. He isn’t putting the world first. He wants to save Newt.

She nods at him and it feels like the entire church crackles with static energy. “Okay.”


	2. 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last part :)  
> Don't worry - the series isn't over

Thomas sits down while she carefully works the scalpel to remove the tracker in the back of his neck.

Gally watches right over her shoulder, arms crossed tight and she can feel the glare on his face as though it were a tangible weight. Frypan has been tasked with setting up some form of cot or palette for Thomas to be laid on. Newt paces in agitation before her.

Brenda shows up just as Teresa begins, and she nods quietly to them.

Teresa is too distracted to think about her now, though.

It’s not a difficult thing, but it does take long minutes to carefully incise past the epithelial skin layers into the first dermis. There is where the tiny piece of technology was implanted just above the vertebrae. With the closest thing to tweezers they have, she gently extracts the antennae end, and then – making Thomas flinch – pulls it free.

All too suddenly, it’s done.

Thomas turns back to her, eyes fixed on the silicone coated piece of hardware.

“Okay. Okay, let’s do this.”

.

Frypan and Brenda have set up a space. They’ve found some old broken pieces of church pews and then some dust sheets and prayer cushions and made them up into a passable bed. It’s set against the wall, half hidden in shadow with just a few candles for light.

Thomas stands facing it. He doesn’t make any move, but Teresa knows he’s listening as she explains what needs to be done.

“Just get it over with,” Thomas tells her eventually, when she’s laid out the main parts.

Teresa sucks in a breath, glances back at the others, and picks up one of the syringes.

“I won’t take it,” Newt says.

Heads wheel to him. Teresa falters. He looks calm, entirely himself, totally in control.

“I mean it,” he says. “No. I’m not going to take this when you had to be…tortured to get it, no bloody way.”

“I’m doing this,” Thomas says, turning. He lost the jacket before his tracker was removed, but now he doesn’t pause in rolling up his sleeves. “Don’t ask me to just sit here and not do anything, Newt.”

“Because it’s always about you?” Newt snaps. There’s that feral edge to him again; anger that’s his own – terror too visceral to cope with in its natural form and so altered, feeding into fury – but also that touch of malevolence that isn’t Newt at all.

“No,” Thomas refutes, his own voice rising to meet Newt’s as he steps towards him. “It’s not about me. It’s about you, Newt. And I can do something, right now, while we have time, to stop what’s happening to you.”

“What’s happening to-So you’re okay with just making this decision for me, are you?”

Teresa sees the flicker in Thomas’ face, the moment he breaks under the strain.

“I will never take away your decisions, Newt,” he says, loud, into the blonde boy’s face, the two of them almost trembling with rage. Sometimes anger is the only way to process fear. “But don’t ask me to just watch you die, either.”

Something washes through Newt’s expression. The mad light from the Flare blinks out, and all that’s left is Newt – horrified, terrified and still so, so angry.

“Then don’t ask me to just stand here and let you go through this,” he shouts. It’s disconcerting. Newt has always been so level headed but now their voices are echoing in the acoustics of the dilapidated church and everyone else stands in ringing silence. “She’s going to pour a drug into your veins to torture you with your worst nightmares and I’m not worth that!”

“You are to me!” Thomas screams at him.

Everything stops.

Newt and Thomas are breathing hard, stood between the tables, almost nose to nose, but none of the others look the least bit surprised. Gally looks ferocious, Frypan and Brenda just look unbearably sad.

Newt blinks. His shock shifts into a kind of awe, but his face is edged with sharp regret.

He can’t believe that someone cares about him this much. He can’t even find peace in it, be happy about it, knowing that it’s that devotion which is going to put Thomas through hell any moment now.

“Newt – you dying is pretty much my worst nightmare,” Thomas tells him, his voice soft again, a splintered note in it that feels just moments away from cracking. “At least this way that’ll only be because of the drugs, and it’ll be over. If we don’t do this – do something…you’re going to get worse and when we do lose you…I won’t be able to wake up from it. Just don’t ask me to do that, okay?”

Newt’s expression closes off.

Thomas sighs, a ragged, wounded sound, and he turns away.

Teresa hesitates as he strides back to her. There’s so much regret and pain in his face, and it tugs at her heart but she doesn’t dare question him when he drops to the made up cot and holds out his arm. She attaches the vitals monitor to a finger, and powers on the reader.

It starts up a rhythmic bleeping sound, loud in the sudden quiet. It’s his heartbeat; fast, faster than it should be but nothing worrying considering his stress. The glowing display flashes with his pulse and blood pressure in numbers. Everything is working.

She drugs him.

The paralytic goes first; slides straight into the bloodstream through the crook of his elbow. Very quickly, Thomas’ weight starts to lose all ability to hold itself.

“Whoa,” he murmurs, watching his control slip away.

Teresa tries to catch him, but he’s bigger than her, almost all muscle despite his lean build, and she can’t manoeuvre him.

Newt’s closed off expression snaps into fear and alarm in an instant, and despite his bad leg, he beats Gally to the side of the cot. He catches Thomas’ shoulders, helping to lower him back and Teresa can see the careful way Newt grips him despite how upset he is.

“His eyes are open,” Gally observes, setting down Thomas’ legs without much fuss.

“I’m fine,” Thomas says, though he sounds more like he’s trying to reassure them. Being unable to move must be quite a fear in itself for someone who’s survived on running.

“It’s to paralyse him,” Teresa says. “It’s not a sedative, or a painkiller. The sub- Thomas will have to be awake.”

“It’s sadistic,” Newt says waspishly. He’s already moved back again, standing a step from the cot, his thin frame strung with vibrating tension.

“He agreed,” Teresa reminds him, careful but also pointed. Then she kneels down next to Thomas, trying to block out both Gally and Newt. “Thomas? I…I need to insert the drain now. It…it’ll hurt, okay? But only for a moment.”

He can’t move anything below his neck, but he turns his head to her and nods slightly. “Just do it.” Then his eyes swing to Gally. “Make sure,” he says.

“You got it,” Gally tells him, scowl affixed yet again to Teresa’s back in a way she can feel tangibly.

Thomas knows he can’t ask this of Newt, so instead its Gally’s job to make sure she does what she’s said she will. It’s his job to make sure the trade goes off as planned if he’s not coherent for it. Teresa can’t even find insult in his caution. She proved he couldn’t trust her once before.

Teresa fetches the cannula and the tubing. She holds it up as she connects the distilling filter and the collection vial, so he can see what she’s doing. Then comes the hard part.

Very gently, she touches her fingers to his jaw, and tilts his head away. Right by the hairline, below the ear, behind the cord of the neck…she has to get this in the right place, but she’s studied it enough. She knows what to do.

Thomas makes a strangled sound when she inserts the needle.

It’s awful; a bitten back groan of sharp pain that turns to choking breaths as he fights through the sensation. His eyes blow wide out, pupils constricting, rolling up and his jaw goes from locked to completely slack. Next to him, the reader on the vitals monitor goes haywire; the bleeping becoming so rapid it’s almost a buzz and the numbers scrolling up.

“What the bloody fuck did you do?”

Newt’s voice is entirely unbalanced with rage. He’s suddenly right there; bearing over her, like he wants to place himself between Thomas and the needle and knowing he can’t is shredding him on the inside.

“He’s fine!” Teresa blurts, voice thick, and it’s only then she realises there are tears on her face; that she can taste the salt of them in the corners of her mouth. “He’s fine. This is how it works.”

“It doesn’t look like he’s fine,” Newt snaps. His eyes are wild.

The other side of her, Gally is squeezing into his own arms so hard his hands are white. His jaw is so tight Teresa isn’t sure how he isn’t breaking his teeth. Frypan stands well back, hands on Brenda’s shoulders over in the candlelight by the table. Brenda’s eyes are large in the fluttering light, her hands pressed to her mouth.

The bleeping of the monitor flickers and slowly starts to space out again.

“The enzyme is produced in the base of the brain.” Teresa sticks to this; science, honest facts. She feels like she wants to crumble; the dual attack of Thomas’ agony and Newt’s reaction eating away at her. She has to hold. They’ve come this far. “The needle has to reach that pocket in order for the fluid to drain through it. I’m _sorry_ , Newt. But he’s okay.”

“You stuck it in his _brain_?” Gally demands. There isn’t a word for how utterly repulsed, horrified and angry he looks.

“No!” Teresa blurts, shuddering. “That’s too dangerous. It has to reach an area near the brain stem where the enzyme naturally collects. That’s all.”

Gally scoffs derisively.

There’s a weak groan from beside them.

Teresa turns but before she can speak, Newt has dropped down beside her, a storm of anxiety as he curls his fingers into Thomas’ shoulder.

“Tommy?”

“Shit,” Thomas breathes riddled with pain, and then he sucks in a breath. “Hurry it up.”

Teresa snatches the tubes she’s already connected up and fixes them to the cannula. Then she moves away, just for a moment to pick up the next syringe.

“Here we go,” she says. “Thomas, it’ll start quickly but it’ll build up as it metabolises. It’ll be over, though, I promise.”

“Save it,” he manages through a tight jaw. “I don’t think you said any of this to Minho.”

Teresa squeezes her eyes shut. He’s right. She never did. And then she nods, focuses on his arm again, and plunges the hallucinogen into his veins.

Thomas looks over. His eyes, already sliding out of focus, catch Newt’s and Teresa goes still. She suddenly feels both like she’s intruding and like she’s not even here.

“I’m sorry,” Thomas breathes.

Newt sucks in a breath, his grip tightening, but Thomas is already gone.

.

“Newt, you’re next.”

“No.”

Teresa worries her fingers around the freshly cleaned scalpel blade as she watches from across the cavernous empty space. Frypan sets both his hands on Newt’s shoulders and presses, gently but firmly.

“Newt,” he tries again. “You heard what she said. It’s going to get worse while it makes its way through. Take your turn now – you can sit with him after.”

For a suspended moment, Newt doesn’t react at all.

He just sits on that half broken stool close beside the cot, folded forward, elbows on his knees and watching Thomas. His face is etched with dread and pain. Thomas is still – kept that way by the drug, but his expression is twisted, his breathing harsh and now and then he makes small bitten back noises of horror at the back of his throat. The machine beeps next to him, a constant, if elevated pace, echoing in the church, but Teresa has been counting as she cleaned the surgical blade, and it’s increasing.

She has tried not to look, honestly. She walked away as soon as Thomas succumbed to the hallucinations, and she didn’t look back the entire time she set about cleaning the scalpel and setting out the next lot of gauze. She doesn’t want to watch him suffer. Having to set it into motion herself cuts deep, though she can’t pretend she’s the one hurting most right now. Even just looking over at that corner feels like intruding on something private; intimate.

Gally seems to somewhat agree, as he’s parked himself somewhere midway between them and her, looking like he’s waiting for a fight.

But then Newt nods. It’s a sharp, jerky motion, and when he stands it’s the exact same.

“Fry-“

“I’m staying,” Frypan confirms with no prompting. “Me and your boy gonna be right here.”

He hesitates a second longer, then Newt’s striding towards her, shrugging off his own jacket as he goes. He drops into the seat before Teresa.

She doesn’t try talking to him. She sets her fingers to the back of his neck, ignoring the flare of hurtpainregret when he flinches, and then she raises the scalpel. The whole time her mind can’t wander from the way Fry called Thomas Newt’s, and how no one – even Newt himself – made a murmur to refute it.

It doesn’t have to mean anything. They’ve all always been protective of each other, and Newt took Thomas in back on his first night in the Glade. They’ve always claimed each other as family against the world. This is nothing new.

But she still can’t help feeling she may have missed even more in a year than she’d first thought.

.

It escalates, as she said it would.

The sharp exhalations, ragged breaths and muffled shouts start to climb in volume and mix with cut off words – things that don’t fully make it from the hallucination to the physical. Thomas’ face is tight, his head turning side to side with stilted, wrenching motions.

Newt is strung taut like a bow the entire time it takes her to extract his tracker.

Frypan finds a prayer cushion and uses that and his hand to try to steady Thomas’ head. He keeps up a constant murmur to him; too low to pick out above the frantic bleeping of the monitor and Thomas’ own sounds of horror. But he talks to him. Brenda paces the church, anxious, murder glowing in her eyes as she steps between the scattered pews. Gally stands, fixed, his expression growing steadily darker.

Newt’s tracker is finally removed and he doesn’t even look back at her.

He crosses the distance to the corner and sinks down. Fry gives up his space, leaving Newt to help hold Thomas’ head still. Gally pushes Frypan towards her.

“Your turn.”

.

Thomas starts to cry out.

Any words he might have half managed before are lost now in the vice grip of nightmares. Newt hovers over his head, his face a mask of second hand pain that twists and shatters every time Thomas’ does the same. He keeps a hand pressed against Thomas’ neck, and the other holding the cushion to the opposite side of his head, but Thomas still fights the hold with the only mobility he has. Frypan tucked the draining equipment out of sight beneath the palette and Newt has made no move to check on them.

“You chose somewhere soundproof, right?” Brenda asks Gally. Her tone is genuinely concerned; eyes darting across to Thomas’ corner, but there’s an edge of black humour to her words.

Gally can’t nod. Teresa has the scalpel against his skin. But she hears him huff a breath.

“It’s remote,” he says, still apparently keenly aware that Teresa can’t know exactly where they are. “No one should hear.”

Brenda considers him for a second, and then she nods briskly. Turning to the table, she snatches up a powerful looking hand gun that she lifts easily in one hand. With her free one, she pinches the slide and cocks it back until it clicks, sharp and loud, through the sound of Thomas’ shouts.

“I’ll check the perimeter, just in case.”

With a last glance – upset, worried – at Thomas, and something like warning at Teresa, Brenda heads in the opposite direction. She strides through the fuzzy shafts of blue light from the stained windows and disappears back into shadow.

“You almost done?” Gally asks her.

“Almost,” Teresa confirms. “Hold still.”

Across from them, over by the dark wall, Thomas’ voice is starting to turn ragged; the shouts echoing up into the vaulted ceiling. The drug must have almost run its course. It’s been quick; she can only hope it’s extracted enough. Newt still hovers over him, curled so far forwards he’s barely on the stool and Teresa can see the way his whole frame shakes even in the gloom.

She tugs the tracker free. Gally clearly feels it and knows what it means because he’s already up, out of the chair and striding away, heedless of the trickle of blood at the nape of his neck.

It’s right on time, too.

Thomas _screams._

It’s a raw, twisted sound that feels almost like its trying to shatter his larynx as it claws into the air. The paralytic is beginning to wear down – everyone is different and it’s hard to tell exactly how they’ll metabolise. It leaves Thomas mostly unable to move, but with the starting signs of shakes and muscle twitches.

Newt rears back and then throws himself forwards, circling around to the side of the cot. His hands clamp around Thomas’ wrists where they’re fixed and tense, tendons standing out in sharp relief against his skin.

“Thomas?!” He tries, his shout swallowed by the next screaming cry of horror and grief. “Tommy?!”

Gally, Frypan and Teresa all rush over.

Frypan snatches Gally’s arm, keeping him a pace back at the last second, just as Newt flies up, wheeling around and turning on Teresa.

She feels the air rush out of her lungs, pressure clamping down; her own ribcage like a vice that’s turned on her so she can’t draw in another breath.

Newt is shaking, trembling, more furious than Teresa has ever seen him before. It’s chilling, but this time, it’s an anger that’s all his own, entirely wielded by him and not the virus carving into his brain.

“Wake him up!” he demands.

Thomas’ screams reverberate around the walls. In the flickering candlelight Teresa can see the shining tear tracks on Newt’s face; the way his eyes swim, glossy over the fury. How long has he been crying for?

“I can’t,” she chokes.

She’s hurting too – she didn’t expect this, didn’t process it. She coped when it was Minho but this…it feels like someone tearing into her and cutting to bone. But that’s clearly nothing compared to Newt.

“WAKE HIM UP,” he shouts.

“Newt!” Gally tries.

“I can’t!” Teresa yells back at him. A headache is forming behind her eyes. The sound of Thomas’s horror and fear has turned warbling; his voice is starting to give out even though the drug isn’t done.

“Why the bloody fuck not?!” Newt’s shaking. There’s a wildness in him; horror clamouring in the twist of his features.

She’s suddenly reminded of the day Newt broke his leg.

Thomas set off an alarm when he saw one of his closest friends sneak out early on the monitors and realised what he was going to do. Ava insisted they couldn’t interfere. It was for the good of the entire planet.

They’d been forced to sedate Thomas.

He made it through five scientists, evaded three security watchers and was racing towards the maze entrance through the maintenance tunnel before one of the medics darted him. They had to keep him under for three days – until they could be sure Newt was going to make it, too.

And now she’s being faced with a parallel; only this time it’s Newt who can’t do anything but watch. And it’s killing him.

“He’s already awake.” Teresa’s pleading with him. She doesn’t know when she started crying; just that somehow she is now. “It’s working its way out. It’s almost done. I promise he’ll be okay.”

Behind them, Thomas’ voice cracks. He sucks in a rattling breath and Newt is already back at his side, crouching on the floor, a hand pressed to fevered skin right where his collarbones dip to meet at the base of his throat.

“Tommy?” Newt calls to him. “Come on. Come out of there.”

He’s regaining motor control; the muscle twitches are fiercer, and then suddenly, his whole hand moves; flinches, curls into a fist and swings out.

“Whoa-Hey!” Newt shouts. He ducks it, both hands leaping up to snatch Thomas’ wrist.

Gally and Frypan both dart forwards, one either side of the cot to press down on his limbs. Thomas’ head twists, shaking, side to side, cracked shouts and cries escaping. The bleeping of the monitor attached to his finger is erratic; rapid, keeping pace with his heart as it thunders with terror. His blood pressure is high, too high. Teresa presses her hands to her mouth and forcibly chokes back her own cry of anguish.

Why?

Why is it so much worse for him? Maybe it’s just that she feels it so much more than she did with Minho, but she doesn’t think that’s right. Is it because they don’t have more equipment here – the harness to properly, safely restrain him? The drug techs to monitor the levels? They can’t do anything but wait, but even so, Teresa feels like Thomas feels it worse.

Are his fears more than Minho’s?

No. Fear is individual to a person.

Is it because he can produce more of the enzyme and therefore metabolising a dose takes more from him?

Maybe.

Thomas screams again, but this time it breaks down. It turns into cries and it sounds like he’s choking, unable to draw in breath. His eyes open, completely dilated and cloudy with visions and horror. He’s crying too; the tears breaking from beneath his eyelashes and rolling back into his hair. His head twists into the makeshift cot and his expression crumbles.

“No,” he rasps. “No, no… no…New…”

Newt seems to splinter apart. He slips onto the floor, a haunted look etched into his face and his hands go slack over Thomas’ wrist. It doesn’t matter. Thomas has stopped moving.

Gally slowly takes his weight off of Thomas’ legs, and Frypan releases his other arm. They hover, the three of them, wary and scared but so anxiously expectant.

“Is that it?” Gally barks at her. “Is it done?”

Teresa moves slowly, jarringly. She’s so cautious about moving around Newt; can’t shake the feeling that he’s barely tolerating her presence. And then she reaches to lift up the extraction tubing that was tucked to the side of the palette.

There’s enough candlelight, enough moonlight, to shine bright through the small glass vial.

And it’s full of light, blazing blue serum; the pure enzyme that has been filtered through the distilling chamber connecting the vial to the tubes.

Gally goes stiff.

“That’s it?” Frypan asks. “He went through all of this for…that?”

Teresa chances a glance at Newt.

He’s staring at the serum sample hanging from her fingers. He looks distant, hollow. Resentment - deep, burning loathing – darkens his eyes. He’s almost recoiled away from it, fingers still loose around Thomas limp wrist, but Newt’s shoulder is curved forward, as though still trying to protect him however futile it is.

“I know it seems…” Teresa tries, but words fail her. She isn’t sure what word to use. She swallows and starts again. “This is actually a lot.”

“So he’s going to wake up now, right?” Frypan asks. His eyes dart from her, to Thomas, and finally rest with cloudy concern on Newt.

“He is awake,” Teresa repeats. Very carefully, she reaches to hold Thomas’ head still and then slides free the cannula. He groans but otherwise doesn’t make any acknowledgement. Newt flinches. Frypan’s expression twists with distaste. “I told you; it’s not sedation,” she continues. “He…the hallucinations are strong. People in them…they don’t register the world outside. It’s just a lot for the system – the brain – to process. This is usually the end…he can probably hear you now, though.”

Newt’s eyes flicker.

The others are clearly waiting for him because after a second of clear dread, he pulls himself back up, kneeling beside the cot.

“Tommy? Can you hear me you dumb Shank?”

Frypan snorts in amusement. It’s a sound that’s broken through more because of high stress than any real humour in the situation. Gally’s face twists in something that might be agreement.

“Come on you idiot,” Newt continues, though his voice isn’t hard anymore; it’s gone soft, pressing. “Thomas?”

Teresa holds her breath.

She’s never seen this procedure go wrong but it’s also not been performed – to the best of her knowledge – outside of a carefully controlled and monitored lab. Watching Thomas, it sends a bolt of new, gripping fear straight through her. Was she really going to do this to herself?

The heart monitor is slowing down.

They all seem to listen to it for drawn out moments, and then it stabilizes. Newt’s hand shakes where it rests in the hollow of Thomas’ shoulder. Teresa eyes Thomas for lasting effects. There’s cold sweat on his skin; his pulse pounding in the tense cord of his neck. Where his head has rocked side to side in an effort to escape the visions, it’s aggravated the insertion point for the cannula; the skin red and a slight trickle of blood already drying around the puncture.

Finally, he sucks in a breath and his eyes snap open.

They’re clear. There’s nothing of the drug left. They flash wildly around, taking in the far off cobwebbed ceiling of the church, then his own position tucked into a corner, and finally the faces gathered around him.

He tries to sit up and almost collapses sideways as his muscles struggle to obey.

“Whoa, hey,” Newt exhales, reaching out to steady him.

“N-Newt,” Thomas’ voice is a grating kind of rasp but it’s thick with clear relief.

Frypan elbows Gally and nods to the side. The pair of them move without a word and for an instant, Teresa thinks they’ve forgotten about her, but then Gally’s hand curls around her arm.

“Come on,” he says.

Teresa doesn’t have much of an option to hesitate. She lets herself be towed away and in her last look back, she can just see the two boys hugging tightly beneath the stained glass window.

.

There’s a deathly silence over the table where Gally points her into a seat.

Frypan grabs a flask of some kind – water, Teresa suspects – and he runs it over to Thomas and Newt but doesn’t stay. He rejoins them, sinking into an empty chair next to Gally, who has his boots propped on a stool. All of their thoughts are twisted up, occupied.

Finally, it’s Brenda who’s first to speak.

She didn’t come back inside until Thomas came around, and after a fretful look over at that corner, she took a seat facing firmly away from it, between the two boys. Teresa can’t quite puzzle her out. She clearly cares a great deal, but she’s distant.

“So you’ve been having fun,” she says. Her voice is hard, an edge of coldness that’s razor sharp. “How many people have you done this to in the past year?”

Teresa swallows back her own sharp response. It won’t help here. She swallows and carefully says, “I haven’t been having fun.”

Brenda scoffs.

Gally shoots the darker girl a sideways look. He might be a touch…concerned. It’s an almost strange expression on him, but he also seems to agree with her.

“You think this has been fun?” Teresa asks, and she can hear her own voice going thin. “I turned in people I care about because I believe that this is bigger than all of us. I didn’t do that lightly; I never have. I’m not having fun – I’m trying to find a cure. The entire popul-“

“Don’t,” Frypan says. He’s weary, bone tired, but he sounds firm. “Just don’t, Teresa.”

She can feel her heart cracking again.

She knew she’d never sway Thomas, or even Newt. She hadn’t expected Gally at all and thought Brenda would be out of the picture. But Frypan…she’d just assumed he wouldn’t pick a fight. He’d not been much for one before, not that she remembered and now she feels narrow minded for making the assumption. He was, after all, the person to cut her free of Gally’s post back in the Glade. He has more conviction in him than she gave him credit for.

She lost all of them.

Brenda flips over her wrist and checks the watch face on the inside, strapped over her fingerless glove.

“How are we doing?” Gally asks her.

“We’ve got time,” she says. She glances back behind her seat to Thomas and quickly sits forward again, her eyes troubled. “Not much, but we’re okay.”

Teresa watches her, watches the way her fingers pick at the table, the line of tension in her shoulders, clear through the threadbare grey sweater.

“I don’t get it,” she says quietly. Heads snap up to her and Brenda’s is slowest, a calculated movement. Teresa swallows and follows through. “He saved _you_. You of all people should-“

“Should what?” Brenda practically hisses at her, rocking forwards in her chair with the kind of purpose Teresa likens to a snake readying a strike. Her pulse spikes. “Should _what_? Because if you think for a second I’m okay with any of this, you don’t know how wrong you are.”

“What he’s done – it’ll give Newt a year, at least,” Teresa argues. She tries to control her heart rate, keep her voice down, very aware of their little bubble of tension in the pool of candlelight. “And he could give others that, too. How can you not see that?”

Brenda looks furious.

“Are you heari- Is she hearing herself?” Brenda seems to be appealing to the boys, both of whom just sit rigidly quiet. Brenda wheels back on her. “Thomas saved my life, and he did it without needing to scream his voice out. And yeah; maybe it’ll give Newt a year – that’s why he did this. That’s the only reason. But have you stopped for a second to think what this has actually done right now? We’ve been listening to him scream for half an hour. Did you even look at Newt once? You hurt way more than just Thomas. And you’re seriously sitting here saying you want to put him through this again?”

“I don’t _want_ to put him through this again,” Teresa argues. She doesn’t want to, it’s the truth but she can’t touch the mention of Newt. Of course she’s looked at him. She looked until it hurt too much to keep looking.

Brenda shakes her head. She looks almost pitying, but there’s still that distinct coldness to her pretty features. “But you still care about the world more,” she says, and Teresa can’t argue it.

Don’t they see that this is bigger than them? They’re just a handful of people against billions that the Flare is destroying.

A glance either side tells her she’s the only one. Frypan’s expression is fixed, his jaw tight, something unmoveable and warning in his eyes. Gally’s attention has slid sideways to Brenda, and his arms are still folded, his jaw still tight but his eyes are blazing. Teresa isn’t sure what’s going on there, but she’s pretty sure she’s never seen Gally look at anyone quite that way; respect and surprise that burn together into something that might be the kindling of loyalty.

How long has Gally been with them anyway? When did he fall back into their lives? How is he even alive himself? Questions Teresa knows won’t get any answers.

“I don’t care if Thomas can save the world,” Brenda says clearly. “I don’t care. He saved my life, but I wouldn’t have wanted him to if this was the cost, and if you think I’ll just stand aside and let you do this to him again…”

Her voice tails off, but Teresa doesn’t need more.

Brenda didn’t interfere with this choice because it was Thomas’ right to make it. And she may have not been in the church for the worst of it, but Teresa has realised that didn’t mean she couldn’t hear the screams or that she doesn’t care. Brenda cares too much. Thomas had saved her life – twice now – and that’s reflected in this steadfast loyalty and fierce protectiveness. It’s not romantic. There was a time back in the Scorch when Teresa had wondered at that, but now she can see that it isn’t. If the way she’s acutely aware of and unconcerned by Newt’s importance to Thomas didn’t give that away, then her expressions and words alone would have been enough. She simply loves him in a way that’s fire forged, burned in with sand and struggle. She’s prepared to stand between him and WCKD if it comes to it.

Teresa never got a chance to know that kind of family.

She traded it away. And she’s trying so hard, sitting in this hard backed chair, surrounded with people who would all die for each other, to hold fast to her beliefs. She did the right thing. The world is bigger. But when she’s looking at them; people she used to feel like she knew who survived so much and are still coming back for one they lost…the world starts to feel smaller.

Her eyes flit past the table to the shadows behind. It’s the first time she’s really allowed herself to.

Thomas has regained his mobility. He’s sitting up under his own power, boots back on the ground and Newt sits next to him, folded forwards, hands on his knees. They’re speaking far too quietly to hear.

Teresa wonders what Thomas saw in his fearscape. He told them his worst fear was Newt dying, but was it really? Sometimes the subconscious can deliver even worse terrors. She’s curious, from a clinical standpoint. What did he see? Why did his body process the drugs faster even than she’d thought? Could the fact that he voluntarily did any of it affect the result pattern? Would his brain yield that much of the enzyme if they put him under by force?

Something inside of Teresa recoils violently at the thought.

No. She could never do this to him if she knew he was resisting.

She tries not to think of Minho. Something she’s kept herself entirely distant from for the past several months suddenly feels a whole lot more personal. She can’t afford that. The world has to come first.

But it’s even harder to tell herself that when she’s watching Thomas.

“What are you looking at?”

Teresa startles, her eyes jumping to Gally’s defensive glare.

“Nothing,” she says.

Gally raises an eyebrow at her, but otherwise doesn’t speak.

Still, her eyes dart over once more, without her consent. The moon has shifted and the corner is just touched with a blue glow, dust motes caught in the bleak beam. Thomas reaches down and picks up the vial of serum that’s fallen to the cot beside him. She watches the way he turns it between his fingers, head tilting as he speaks to Newt. She can just make out the leftover shake in Newt’s hands as he listens.

She turns away again.

The year she missed seems to stretch out in her memories; vast and unknown, something that resembles the long desert and salt flats of the Scorch. They’re different now. Maybe it is Minho’s absence, but she doesn’t remember them quite like this. What did she really miss?

She’s opened her mouth to ask before she can properly process it, not even time to consider if it’s smart.

“Are they…together?”

Gally’s attention snaps straight to her and his face is set in challenge. “What’s it to you if they are?”

She asked, she wondered, but she can still feel shock rush down her veins like seawater.

_They’re-_

“Gally.”

Frypan’s voice is chastising, but with no real weight behind it. Brenda almost looks like she’d be smiling if this were any other time.

Gally shrugs, unrepentant. “Still say it’s none of her business.”

Frypan doesn’t refute that.

Teresa quickly shakes her head, managing a whisper around the lump that’s formed in her throat. “No. No, you’re right.”

This is what she traded away. Or not. No – perhaps it was never even hers to begin with.

Gally hasn’t confirmed or denied anything, all she has to go on is what she’s seen for herself, what she’s always seen. Even growing up it was Thomas and Newt, the two of them. She thought that things would change; they were growing up, being boys, but eventually Newt would be in the Maze and it would be her and Thomas.

But then he’d gone and betrayed them, and suddenly he was in the Maze as well. It started there all over again, in the Glade; the way Newt couldn’t help believing in Thomas, couldn’t help aligning with him and how Thomas had sought his approval, even if he didn’t know it at the time. But it had made sense. Thomas was their way out, and Newt, for all intents and purposes, was the one in charge. Minho had been with them back then, and all through the Scorch; they’d been a team and Teresa’s never seen these two without their missing piece.

She wants to attribute it to that, but she’s finding it harder and harder. Newt’s fury over the suggestion of Thomas undergoing this, the way Thomas had shouted at him – you are to me – is that just because they lost Minho? Or is it something that’s been there, between them, the whole time?

She thinks she’d hoped, or maybe she just hadn’t wanted to see but now there was no looking around it. Even if he and Newt weren’t…something, whatever she was to Thomas once, it was long gone.

.

Thomas only sways once, briefly, as he stands up, and then he seems to completely ground himself just a second later. Newt gives him a questioning look, hand on his shoulder, that’s answered with a nod and then they’re both striding towards the table.

Teresa’s back goes stiff.

Thomas leans over Brenda’s shoulder, in the space between her and Gally to set the vial of serum down.

“How much is needed for a dose?” he asks. His voice is still rough, but it’s strong, it’s returned quicker than Teresa had expected. “Tell me.”

“And if you lie I’ll take your thumb off,” Gally adds, sounding somewhere between deadly serious and a little hopeful.

Thomas doesn’t say a word.

“She’s not going to lie,” Brenda says. Her voice is touched with something sinister. “If you think she is, just give Newt the whole thing.”

Teresa’s heart lurches and she hates herself for it. Hates that this is what it’s come to – that they assume she’ll lie – and also that she just can’t risk not keeping some of that serum for her tests. Even after everything she’s seen and heard tonight, she still can’t let go of this.

“I won’t lie,” she hurries to say, speaking directly to Thomas. _Please believe me. Please_. “But it’s not simple. The Clinical Trials have only just started; we’re still trying to work out what is needed and different sub- and everyone produces different amounts.”

Newt, stood just behind Gally’s chair, twitches at her aborted mention of subjects. Thomas doesn’t spare a thought for it. He snatches one of the still packaged syringes from the spill of her belongings on the table, and tosses it to her.

“When Mary did this it didn’t take much. You can keep half.”

It’s more than she’d expected. Teresa nods and tears into the packet.

Brenda flips her wrist again.

“How are we doing?” Newt asks her.

“Almost time. Let’s move this along. You boys need to change.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Thomas says.

Brenda doesn’t miss a beat as she slides out of her chair and stretches. “Saw that coming. Gally?”

“Yeah,” he says, and swings his boots down before striding cleanly away.

Fry gets up, too. “I’ll start packing up.”

Brenda nudges Thomas’ arm. “Hey,” she tells him, nodding across to Newt, who’s already listening. “I was out of it, but I remember feeling the injection. It’s a bit of a shock to your system. Made me fuzzy for a few minutes. Just be prepared, right?”

Newt nods. Thomas gives her a weary but deeply thankful smile. “Thanks, Brenda.”

She taps his arm with the side of her closed fist; a soft, supportive thing, and then she’s leaving, too.

Teresa knows better than to try to talk right now.

She focuses on syringing out half of the serum, and then an additional measure – the only token of apology and good will she can give. Then it’s Thomas’ turn to look anxious as she turns to them, candlelight glinting off of the needle. Newt doesn’t seem thrilled, but he shrugs off his jacket and pulls back his sleeve.

This is the first time Teresa has laid eyes on Newt’s infection.

It’s an angry, pulsing spread of poisoned black veins, webbing up his forearm and starting to branch across the inside of his wrist. His skin looks pale and almost translucent around the swollen vessels. He curls his fingers into a fist as a tremor shudders up through his arm. They’ve been under a lot of stress – the past hour won’t have helped – and its acting fast.

Teresa can feel her heart constrict, and her eyes lift up to his, but Newt’s expression is closed off. There’s a warning there. He doesn’t want her to comment on it, doesn’t want a diagnosis or an opinion, or an apology.

She heeds it.

She doesn’t even speak to warn him it’ll sting. She takes his wrist, holds his arm at the right angle, and then positions the syringe.

Newt sucks in a sharp breath as the serum bolts into his bloodstream. Almost instantly his balance rocks and he keels sideways, eyes fluttering closed.

“Whoa, okay, I got you.”

Thomas catches him, just, and helps bear them both down to the floor, laying Newt back where his head can rest on one of their bags. There’s no panic in his face, and Teresa’s thankful to Brenda for her warning.

“You’re good,” Thomas tells Newt quietly.

He stands up, turns to face Teresa. For a moment, she thinks he might say something to her, but she watches his face as he seems to reconsider, and then he’s turning away.

She speaks before she’s thought it through yet again. This might be her only chance, without any of the others to intercept.

“What did you see?”

Thomas goes still.

Across the church, Frypan is kicking apart the palette Thomas used, scooping up anything that’s theirs as he checks around. Gally is shrugging into black camouflage fatigues that Teresa recognises from the WCKD guards she walks past every day. They really have planned this – planned _something_. Newt lays still, his breathing deep and even, eyes roving fast beneath the closed lids.

Thomas turns to her, slowly, slightly. “What does it matter?”

 _It doesn’t_. But she can’t make herself say it. She’s not even sure she asked because the scientist in her wants to know. Another part of her threw that question into the void space between them; a girl she used to be, who’d grown up with the boy he once was. She wants to know because once she might have guessed what his worst nightmares were and now she can’t.

For a moment, she thinks he won’t answer. And then, when he does, she almost wishes she’d never asked. Not because of the horrific details, but because of the dead, distant way he says it, and everything that he doesn’t say.

“Grievers, Deadheads, Chuck, Ava, Janson…” There’s a pause, his eyes focus again. “You.” She sucks in a breath, heart twisting like its being crushed – she’s there, on that list – but he’s continuing already. “Minho, Brenda, the building, Mary, the train, the tunnel, the maze…Newt.”

And he stops.

She doesn’t know if it was in order or not. She doesn’t know what some of them are – what train? What tunnel? - and they are things she won’t, can’t ask him. But she thinks that even if everything else was jumbled up, Newt being the last is probably true.

“Thomas-“ Teresa breathes.

His eyes dart to her, forcibly shutting away the horrors behind a semblance of calm.

He’s waiting for her to continue, but she isn’t sure what to say. Finally he nods at the vial in her hands – the small amount that remains; her half of their agreement.

“We both got what we wanted here,” he says, and he sounds tired, just so world worn.

“And if it works?” she asks through the tremors in her voice. “If you can cure-“

Thomas interrupts her.

“He made me promise to never go through this again.”

Everything she wants to say, to ask, to press on him dries up at the back of her throat. Newt made him promise.

“And you agreed,” she says, hollow. “What happens when he needs more? When Brenda does?”

Thomas’ expression folds, deep pain in his face as his eyes drop, cross to where Newt’s still laid on the ground.

That’s when she knows for sure, the realisation hitting solidly. Newt would rather risk dying than ever watch that again. And Thomas…he only agreed because…

“I know there’s another way,” he says in confirmation. “Maybe you don’t think its safe, but I’ve seen it work.”

“Thomas, it _isn’t_ safe. You really think we’d be doing this if-“

His face twists with a kind of repulsed derision and it sinks through her, cold and brutal like a knife. Her heart hurts; she can feel tears stinging her eyes again, the chill as they roll down her cheeks. Thomas turns away and she steps in his wake like being pulled. It’s like watching every fond memory she has of him, of them, fall through her fingers and shatter on the floor. How did they get so broken?

But of course she knows the answer.

“You don’t believe me?” she calls to him, desperately. Even if they are on a battlefield, this is something she wants him to know. She doesn’t like what’s happened; she never wanted anyone to suffer.

But it triggers something. Thomas wheels back on her, his eyes blazing and defiant anger etched into his features.

“You really expect me to?!” he demands and her throat closes up again. Everything that was suddenly a whirling storm about him quiets down. There’s sad but stoic bluntness to him as he says, “You made your choice.”

Teresa sees movement over Thomas’ shoulder, and then Gally is stepping up beside him, still fiercely challenging. “Everything okay over here?”

He asks it almost like he wants to hear a no.

“Yeah,” Thomas says. He keeps his eyes on her and Teresa knows he wants her to understand him. “Yeah we’re done.”

This time, when he turns his back on her, she doesn’t feel her heart tug to follow. She feels it drop like a stone in her chest.

.

Newt comes around shortly after.

He blinks and sits up, rubs at his forehead, ruffling his fast growing out blonde hair and then leans just slightly on Thomas as he gets back to his feet. He pulls his sleeve back down over the spider web of veins in his arm.

“Took time for me, too,” Brenda says to him with a gentle smile. It takes Teresa aback; gentle isn’t a word she’s ever associated with the girl Thomas found in the Scorch, but she wears it well. “Had a nasty sucker of a bite mark for a while. But it healed.”

Newt smiles wearily at her, giving a thankful nod. The words aren’t important here, nor is the tone, apparently. In fact, if she didn’t see it for herself, Teresa would be at a loss as to how this statement is of any help. But it clearly takes a weight from Newt’s shoulders. It’s another unsettling reminder of what she’s missed.

The truth of it is that Thomas knows these people better than anything he knows of her. He never got his memories back. Everything he knows is from the past year and few weeks of his life, from the day he woke up in the Box beneath the Glade. And they’re the ones who have been there with him.

“You’re feeling okay, though?” Thomas checks.

Newt considers it, studies his own hands as he flexes his fingers and rolls his tongue between his teeth. Then he nods. “Yeah. Yeah. My head…it’s been kind of…fogged up for a while but…I feel fine. Better.”

Gally lets out a long breath and Frypan drops down onto a chair. The tight, dry tension seems to crack and shatter apart around them all. Thomas actually smiles, his hand pressing into Newt’s back.

“Alright then,” Brenda says. “Then let’s get going. We have seven minutes.”

Frypan has all their things collected, Brenda sits with him, an eye on her watch as Thomas and Newt quickly pull on their own stolen guard uniforms. Gally hands them over helmets as they all assemble at the table.

“Okay,” Thomas says. Looks are traded all around the table. “Let’s do this.”

“See you at the finish line,” Frypan says. Brenda gives them a flick of a salute with two fingers. The two of them pick up their belongings and leave. There won’t be any trace that they were ever here.

Gally shakes hands with Thomas and then Newt. It’s less of a business handshake and something more like comrades in arms – _which is what this is_ , Teresa is well aware. Thomas and Gally grasp each other’s arms tight; hold a second, and then release, thick understanding passing between them. When Gally does the same for Newt, his grip is gentle, fingers just barely closing over Newt’s right arm, but he doesn’t even flinch.

He really is healing. Already.

The leftover serum in Teresa’s pocket burns and she thinks of the lab. She wants to know how. And they’re going to escort her right back to the building.

Thomas turns to Newt and they lock hands. There’s a brief hug between the two of them, something bracing and fuelled with the starting embers of adrenaline, and then both Gally and Newt are heading off. Thomas turns to her.

Teresa keeps her eyes locked on him, hoping he knows she’s sorry for so much, right up until he drops the bag back over her head.

.

Teresa isn’t sure how, but they almost pull it off.

They’re in, the guards are down, and the kids are out, but Minho isn’t with them. She manages to slip Thomas and Newt in the hallways and she manages to avoid Janson’s anger, too, but the boys are exposed. She aims for the lab.

She sets to work on the sample of Thomas’ enzyme. There are tests that must be run to check the viability of the sample – she can’t just shake off that even if she’s seen the change in Newt already. While she works, monitors showing the testing bays on the floors below show her the carnage.

They’ve found Minho. Or maybe he found them. The boys are back together.

One moment it’s the three of them in the hallway, gunfire all around, and then they’re gone. Janson is on the warpath.

The next thing Teresa knows is the explosions that rumble through the glass walls from across the city.

They’re blowing it up, burning it down.

The tests are done, the world is on fire, and she knows the truth.

Ava tries to get her to leave but this – this is what she sacrificed everything for, what she gave up her home for, traded away her friends for. This. Thomas’ serum doesn’t just contain the virus – its destroying it.

So she heads to the security floors, reaches the tannoy system and sends out a plea hoping Thomas is still there to hear it.

“Thomas? Can you hear me? I need you to listen to me. I know you have no reason to trust me, but I need you to come back.”

This is a moment promising him Newt’s life would have helped, but she’s already made that trade too. And now what she says has to somehow break through the promise he made to someone else.

“Thomas, there’s a reason Brenda isn’t sick anymore. There’s a reason Newt won’t ever get sick again. It’s you. Do you understand?”

The tannoy is cold under her fingers and the monitors cover the city but she can’t see them anywhere. Maybe they’re already gone.

“They aren’t sick because you healed them. They don’t have to be the only ones. All you have to do is come back and this will all finally be over. Please. Just come back to me. I know you’ll do the right th-“

The power goes.

Ava leaves. She’s going to wait for him at the front doors. All they can do now is hope.

The next time Teresa sees Thomas, he’s unconscious. He’s bound to one of the medical stretchers from the trial lab, and Janson struts in front of it, a twisted, cruel kind of smirk set into his features and a mad light in his eyes. When he suggests she accompany him to the lab, she knows it’s not optional. _He agreed_ , Janson tells her. _He came back to save the world_. His voice is nothing but mockery.

It’s a lie.

It makes sense, in the end, that he was infected. She just doesn’t know how long – how much of the man she worked with was Janson’s own ulterior motives and how much was the Flare.

When she gets the chance, she smashes a glass beaker over his head.

It doesn’t knock him out. Thomas is free but Janson smashes her head into metal and she blacks out. Its not for long, but everything is cloudy, a throb starting up in her brain in the moments it takes her to stand. There’s glass shattering, explosions rocking the foundations, fire spilling through the halls. There’s a bullet aimed at her but Thomas is the one to take it. He’s bleeding out when he finds the strength to unleash the Cranks on Janson to save her life.

Teresa thinks they’re going to die on that roof.

The past year feels like a cruel joke. Her life feels like a malicious lie.

She wanted to save the planet, but that was never going to happen. Ava kept the truth from her; that there was never going to be enough for everyone. Janson just wanted to play God.

She gave everything for a cure, in the memory of the mother who was destroyed by the virus. And she loved her mother, but she’s been blinkered, guided by Ava and WCKD and promises. Her mother is gone. Minho, the twenty eight other immunes, even Sonya and Aris…they’re still here.

Thomas is still here. For now; in this moment; her brain fogged with concussion, heat searing into her back and the roof under them trembling as the walls start to give, he’s still alive. And he’s dying.

She loves him. She has for as long as she remembers, but though Ava may have tried to steer her that way, she’s never been in love with him. That wasn’t the kind of love they had, even once, when things were okay. And if he can find that somewhere else; in someone else, that’s all she wants for him. She doesn’t want him to die up here. She wants him to live.

And that’s when the powerful sound of rotor blades drowns out everything else.

Thomas can barely walk, and the Berg can’t land. Between the two of them lies a drop of fifty, sixty storeys and a sea of fire will claim them before the ground does, tongues of flame licking up towards them. If there’s one thing she has left to accomplish in this world, it’s that Thomas makes it off of this roof. And he does. The moments of focus have cost her, and the world swims with burning light and the beautiful destruction, the pulse in her head blissfully quiet.

She feels the building fall away beneath her feet.

It feels like flying, not falling, for a moment.

She keeps her eyes open, makes sure the last thing she’ll see is this; them surviving, escaping. Thomas is still bleeding out, but he’s surrounded – Brenda, Gally, Minho, Vince, Sonya, Harriet, Newt. She knows, even as she drops through the smoke, feels the thick acrid taste flood her airways and press, scalding into her skin, that she won’t be seeing him soon.

Good.

He spent his whole life being used. Now he gets to live.

**Author's Note:**

> The second part will be up shortly :) Feedback always appreciated.


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